The myth of 'shock and awe': why the Iraqi invasion was a disaster

The US army's initial assault on Iraq was meant to be a show of superior
intelligence and overwhelming force. But the reality on the ground was very
different, writes documentary maker Richard Sanders

By Richard Sanders

6:19AM GMT 19 Mar 2013

The lead unit of the US Marine Corps arrived at the gates of Baghdad on the late afternoon of Sunday, April 6, 2003, less than three weeks after crossing the border from Kuwait. Nicknamed “The Dark Side", the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment had a reputation for aggression. Its commander, Lt. Colonel Brian McCoy, led his men from the front in a hard-topped Humvee and was renowned for leaping out of his vehicle in the midst of fighting and throwing hand grenades.

McCoy also had an eye for publicity. He’d welcomed a large number of journalists and photographers under his wing over the previous two weeks. And with the decisive battle for Baghdad looming, the press men now surged forward, eager to capture the iconic images of the Marines storming the bridge over the Diyala River, which marked the southeastern boundary of Baghdad, and the scenes of rejoicing and celebration it was assumed would follow.

But there was a problem – the lack of an enemy. There was desultory Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) and small arms fire from the north side of the river on the evening of April 6 and by nightfall this had petered out entirely. The following morning it seemed clear to the press – many of them hardened war correspondents far more experienced in combat than the young Marines – that the north bank had been deserted.

Then, as the Marines prepared for the assault, one of their armoured personnel carriers suffered a direct hit from an artillery round. Two Marines were killed. It was unclear if the shell was Iraqi or had come from the American side. But the Marines’ blood was up. “They were angry young men,” said one photographer present. A journalist spoke of there being a “blood lust” in the air.

Half an hour later the bridge was stormed. At least three photographers crossed with the first wave. They got their iconic images, which were soon flashed around the world. But there was a sense of theatre. “We’re hearing lots of fire,” American photo-journalist Kit Roane told me during a set of interviews I conducted for a film about the Iraq invasion. “But it becomes pretty apparent at that point that it’s not incoming. That no one is shooting at us.” “It really was like photographing a movie set,” said another photographer. “It sounded great, it looked great, there was smoke everywhere, men screaming, men shouting, running across, lots of noise, lots of energy, but it wasn’t a battle.” He and others stood upright to take their photos.

Once across the bridge, the Marines, fearful of suicide bombers, quickly fanned out to form a defensive perimeter. The area was deserted. But this was one of the main routes out of Baghdad and the people of the Iraqi capital had been told by their Information Minister that the Marines were still 70 miles to the south. Inevitably a trickle of civilian vehicles began to appear from the direction of central Baghdad.

The first was a blue Kia van. Inside were three men and two women, heading for their home close to the bridge. The Marines “start to scream … 800 metres, 600 metres,” recalled Laurent Van der Stockt, a French photographer on assignment with the New York Times. “It’s too close, too close, too close and one starts to shoot and the others start to shoot and everybody is shooting.”

The van ground to a halt, struck by around 100 bullets, three of those inside dead. The two survivors would sit for hours beside their dead relatives, too terrified to move. The van was followed by more vehicles – a pick up truck, a taxi … All were halted by the Marines’ guns. An elderly pedestrian, walking with a stick, was also killed.

Journalists and photographers pleaded with the Marines to hold their fire. The word “murderers” was used by at least two. “One of the young commanders on the ground said that if the Iraqis were dumb enough to drive into their line that was their problem,” recalled Kit Roane. “I said, point taken, but of course they can’t see you. They don’t know you’re here. He just became angry and that was the end of our conversation.”

Iraqis wave to US Marines of Task Force in Tarawa on April 7, 2003 (Getty Images)

It was 30-45 minutes before officers restored order, issuing firm instructions to hold fire until vehicles had a chance to respond to warning shots. “They were shooting like crazy,” recalled Van der Stockt.

Around 15 civilians died at the Diyala Bridge that day. It was not an isolated incident. The speed of the American advance meant civilians were continually caught by surprise and the problem of civilian vehicles driving towards their lines was one the Americans never resolved. Iraq Body Count, the most authoritative collator of casualty statistics in Iraq, has estimated that 6,716 civilians died during the initial invasion – an average of 320 per day. It’s likely the majority were killed by ground forces.

Two days after storming the Diyala Bridge the same Marine regiment pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein in central Baghdad – the iconic image that, at the time, was seen as marking the end of the war. It had taken just 21 days to topple the regime and in the years that have followed a myth has become established – that the initial invasion was a startling success, a triumph of speed and daring, undermined only by the mistakes of the occupation. In fact, the origins of the Iraqi tragedy were all too visible during those first three weeks and the legacy of incidents like that at the Diyala Bridge would weigh heavily on the Americans for years to come.

One expression above all others has become associated with the invasion of Iraq – “shock and awe”. Developed at the Pentagon in the mid-1990s, “shock and awe” was a doctrine designed to leave the enemy so demoralised and disoriented that its will to resist crumbled. In popular parlance it has come to mean the application of overwhelming force, the effective obliteration of the enemy, and for many the term “shock and awe” has come to epitomise the crudeness of the American assault on Iraq.

For civilians close to the Diyala Bridge the assault on the morning of April 7 would certainly have felt like “shock and awe”. But the truth is the Americans – initially at least – had no intention of inflicting “shock and awe” in the sense popularly understood. Quite the opposite.

Look at the figures. For the First Gulf War in 1991 the Americans assembled a coalition army of close to one million troops to invade Kuwait. In 2003, for the invasion of Iraq itself, coalition forces numbered fewer than 200,000. The invasion of Kuwait in 1991 was preceded by a 40-day air campaign. In 2003 there was almost no air campaign prior to the invasion at all.

This partly reflected Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s desire to find ways of projecting American power quickly and efficiently. In common with his neo-Conservative allies he believed a new American century was dawning and he didn’t want to have to spend six months assembling a colossal invasion force every time Washington felt the need to impose its will around the world. “Faster, lighter,” were his buzzwords, and he believed intelligence and hi-tech gadgetry would play a more important role in future conflicts than boots on the ground.

But tied to this was a dangerous misconception – the belief that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be easy. Many in the Pentagon were convinced the entry of American troops into Iraq would trigger an uprising, or perhaps a coup, and that American forces would be welcomed by rapturous crowds.

Britain's 2 Company Irish Guards check a man dressed in civilian clothes in Basra on April 6, 2003 (Getty Images)

In Britain Major-General Tim Cross was in charge of liaising with the American Office of Post-War Planning. Arriving in Washington a couple of months prior to the invasion he was appalled to discover almost nothing had been done. “The major plan for post-war Iraq was that we do not need a plan, that Iraq would resolve itself in effect,” he said later.

The invasion was seen as a decapitation exercise. It was assumed the Iraqi state – under the control of returning exiles - would continue to function and would assume responsibility for running the country the day after the invasion was completed. The initial bombing campaign therefore not only avoided civilian infrastructure – it also largely spared the regular Iraqi Army, which, it was hoped, might switch sides.

In fact, what was planned was a mass assassination attempt, targeting the top 55 people in the Baathist regime. But even this was scuppered. Just hours before the bombing was due to begin the Americans received intelligence locating Saddam at a palace in the south of Baghdad. A decision was taken to launch an immediate strike which would hopefully end the war in one blow.

The palace was obliterated at dawn on March 20. But a few hours later Saddam appeared on television. Not for the last time, American intelligence had proved to be wrong. The rest of the Baathist leadership now had time to move into hiding. That evening the Americans struck their original 55 targets and the images of Iraqi ministries going up in flames was broadcast around the world – frequently under the headline “Shock and Awe!” But it was a meaningless pyrotechnic display, the Americans knowing full well the buildings were empty.

Coalition troops crossed the border on the same day. It quickly became clear there would be no defections, no uprising. Twelve years before, during the First Gulf War, President Bush had called on the Iraqis to overthrow their government, and then abandoned the revolt when it looked as if it would lead to an Iranian-backed Shia government in Baghdad. Tens of thousands were killed in the savage repression that followed and the Americans entirely failed to appreciate the degree of bitterness and cynicism left behind. This time round no one was going to put their head above the parapet until they were sure Saddam had gone.

Instead the British and Americans ran into resistance – at Basra, and above all at Nasiriyah on the Euphrates, where 29 American soldiers were killed in just a few hours on day four of the war. “After that point we never heard anything about capitulation,” said Lt. Colonel Rick Grabowski, who commanded the troops in Nasiriyah. “People approached the Iraqis I think with a much different perspective.”

Six days later the Americans suffered their first suicide bombing. Their whole approach to the war now changed – dramatically. The air campaign was ramped up. And on the ground the principle of “force protection” – always central to American military doctrine – came to over-ride all other considerations.

“The priority is … to protect themselves first and foremost,” recalled one of the photographers at the Diyala Bridge, immediately after the war. “Each unit is really an island … bristling with spears. It’s like a hedgehog. … If you approach them from the outside the chances are you’ll get killed … You put the Americans into an environment where you have civilians, you’re going to get a lot of dead civilians.”

British soldiers take cover as they advance towards central Basra on April 7, 2003 (Getty Images)

In the months following the invasion I interviewed dozens of US service personnel and Iraqi civilians for my film Invading Iraq: How Britain and America Got It Wrong, spending six weeks in Iraq and three weeks touring military bases in the States. The Americans were insistent they made every effort to avoid civilian casualties. But I met Iraqi after Iraqi who told me; “They shot at anything that moved.”

The British were more squeamish. Fearful of a bloodbath, they paused outside of Basra. But American commanders were determined to press on to Baghdad. “Fast is better than slow. Fast is more lethal than slow. Fast is more final,” Lieutenant General David D McKiernan, the supreme commander of ground forces in Iraq, later explained. US forces would now bludgeon their way northwards in a campaign very different from the high precision fantasy that was being sold to the media, and which was central to Rumsfeld’s vision for the American military.

The inadequacy of America’s human intelligence in Iraq is now legendary owing to the failure to find Weapons of Mass Destruction. Equally dramatic, but far less well known, was the abject failure of America’s hi-tech intelligence – its satellites and its much vaunted drones.

Far from being fed a constant, real time supply of imagery of the terrain ahead, the commander of the lead Army unit advancing on Baghdad told me he never knew what was round the next corner. “I was conducting movement to contact to find the enemy, fix them and kill them,” he said – effectively “reconnaissance by force.” A squadron of Apache helicopters dispatched to attack targets south of Baghdad on day five of the war was mauled by forward anti-aircraft units that intelligence had failed to detect “There was definitely something wrong with the intelligence flow,” one lieutenant in the squadron commented afterwards. “It was useless – useless.”

Most extraordinary of all, the Americans managed to lose three entire divisions of the Republican Guard – around 30,000 men. American planners believed the Nebuchadnezzar Division to be in the north of Iraq, the Baghdad Division to be at Kut in the south-west, and they believed they had a precise fix on the positions of the mechanized Medina Division, the most feared, just south of Baghdad. In fact, both the Nebuchadnezzaar and the Baghdad Divisions had been moved to reinforce the defence of the Iraqi capital, the Nebuchadnezzar Division at the start of the war, the Baghdad Division overnight on March 27/28 (days eight and nine of the war) – movements which had passed entirely undetected.

As for the Medina Division, intelligence was confident it had been all but obliterated from the air during the second week of the war. Approaching Baghdad from the south, the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, under Colonel David Perkins, was given the job of delivering the coup de grace.

“I fully expected I would see carnage and destroyed vehicles,” he said. “But I didn’t see any …. We literally came in contact with hundreds of vehicles. None of them was destroyed.” The Medina Division was almost untouched. The Iraqis had thwarted the Americans’ daunting, multi-billion dollar array of hi-tech surveillance through the terrifyingly simple expedient of parking their tanks under palm trees. It was an echo of the 1999 air war in Kosovo which had also yielded startlingly little in terms of destroyed military hardware.

The human intelligence didn’t improve either. Eager to make up for the failure of their mass assassination attempt on the first day of the war, the allies launched no fewer than 50 air attacks on “high value targets” during the three weeks of the invasion to try and take out the Baathist leadership. Every single one was unsuccessful – often at a high cost in civilian life. The invasion of Iraq was an operation lacking intelligence in every sense of the word.

In the end it didn’t matter. As Colonel Perkins’ units approached the Medina Division south of Baghdad the men simply got out of their tanks and walked home. It was a pattern repeated throughout the Iraqi military. Just as the Americans had initially under-estimated the task facing them in invading Iraq, so the hyper-aggression that followed the casualties in Nasiriyah was an over-reaction. There may have been no mass surrender, as the Americans expected, but the bulk of the Iraqi military, including much of the Republican Guard, simply deserted. The forces confronting the coalition consisted primarily of Fedayeen, a fanatical but poorly trained militia directly answerable to Saddam’s son Uday.

Iraqi men push a head of a statue of Saddam Hussein after its destruction on April 18, 2003 in Baghdad (Getty Images)

It was street gangs against soldiers. Initially knocked off balance, the Americans quickly recovered and the resistance soon crumbled. The tragedy was that it took them so long to realize there was often no-one in front of them. Incidents like that at the Diyala Bridge were the result.

It was only after Colonel McCoy’s Marines pulled down the statue of Saddam that the true catastrophe unfolded. Rumsfeld was right – the limited invasion force was more than enough to conquer Iraq. But it wasn’t enough for the peace.

During the making of my film on the invasion I was handed a remarkable piece of footage, taken from a US tank entering Baghdad from the south-west. They were encountering no resistance and civilians had come out to watch. They were not hostile. But there was no cheering, not even waving. For mile after mile the Americans were greeted with blank, expressionless faces. It captured the Iraqi attitude – they loathed Saddam, but they had no love for the Americans.

Everything would depend on what came next. But the American fantasy that the Iraqi state would continue to function and would pick up the pieces the day after Baghdad fell proved entirely unfounded. “You had no Iraqi institutions to co-opt,” recalled General McKiernan. “No Iraqi army, no Iraqi police … No local or national government organisations. Ministries didn’t exist.” General William Wallace, commander of the US 5th Army Corps, put it more succinctly. “There was nobody to receive the surrender from. We couldn’t find them. They weren’t there.”

With the head removed, the Iraqi body politic simply dissolved. Within 24 hours Baghdad had descended into chaos as looting spread. The Americans never recovered their authority. By the time I arrived in the Iraqi capital at the end of July 2003 US troops were universally detested – in part for their perceived arrogance and brutality, but also because of the Americans’ bewildering inability to restore basic services such as water and electricity. Into the power vacuum would flow a brutal insurgency, fuelled by a series of catastrophic American errors, of which the decision to dissolve the Iraqi army was only the most disastrous.

The result was a nine-year conflict which will surely be seen by history as a landmark in the relative decline of the United States. One hundred and thirty nine American soldiers died during the initial invasion of Iraq. By the time the US finally withdrew at the end of 2011 the death toll was 4,485. The British and other coalition countries lost a further 218. More than 100,000 Iraqis had died and the war may have cost America as much as $3 trillion.

From an American perspective the only tangible result was to hand the region on a plate to the Iranians. The new American century, it turned out, lasted less than a decade.